JACK KILBORN ~ TRAPPED (60 page)

Crickets and nothing else.

It also came with a real measure of relief. But at the same time, Sara feared it meant Meadow’s death. The fear trumped the relief, the weight of the realization threatening to sink Sara into the ground. Having one of her kids run away was bad enough. But Meadow actually dying? Dying when it was her job to protect him?

Oh no. Oh no no no.

Sara fell apart.

Laneesha sidled up to her. She’d been walking with her fingers in her ears, and in the moonlight her face glistened like a wet plum. Sara hugged the teen, who hugged back, and they spent a moment sobbing.

Martin touched Sara’s hair.

“
We have to keep going, hon.”

Sara nodded, wiped a fist across her face, rubbing away tears, and began searching for the next ribbon. As she walked, she raged against the conflict going on inside of her. One part, grateful the screaming had ended. The other, angry at herself for being grateful. Add this shame to the horror of murdering a man, and Sara questioned her capabilities to counsel children, or anyone else for that matter. Her job description required empathy, along with the ability to dispassionately disconnect. Sara seemed unable to do either.

That made Sara even more disgusted. On top of everything going on, she had to throw herself a pity party.

“
We should be there soon,” Martin said, coming up behind her. He spoke deliberately, a measure of pain in his voice. “How many ribbons have you counted?”

“
Ten or eleven.”

“
If we’re going in the right direction, the campsite should be very close.”

“
Or we’re heading toward the lake, and will have to retrace all of our steps. We need to pick up the pace, Martin. If there’s any chance Meadow is—”

Laneesha’s scream cut Sara off. She rushed over to the teen, flashlight bobbling, and aimed the beam at the large hill of rubble the girl was facing.

The hill was well over ten feet high, and stretched on for dozens of yards. It was pale gray, made up of what appeared to be stones and branches.

Laneesha clutched Sara, hard enough to squeeze the breath out of her. It pushed Sara closer to the mound, and in a moment that seemed utterly surreal, Sara realized that those weren’t stones and branches.

They were looking at a gigantic pile of human bones.

When Laneesha was a little girl, she wanted to be a big girl. Or more precisely, an adult. She found children her own age boring, much preferring the company of grown-ups. Dolls and games of tag weren’t nearly as stimulating to her as learning to cook, sew, and knit from her mother, change the oil on the car and spackle drywall like her father, bake like grandma, and repair appliances like Uncle Ralph.

Uncle Ralph wasn’t actually her uncle. He was a friend of Dad’s. He was also the nicest adult Laneesha knew, treating her as an equal even when she was as young as six. He never talked down to her, never reprimanded her, never was anything but 100% cool.

When Laneesha turned sixteen, she realized the next step in adulthood was motherhood. She babysat all the neighborhood kids, and wanted one of her own. So she decided to get pregnant. So she sought out the one person who she knew would make an excellent father, and after riding with him to a house to install a satellite TV system, she seduced Uncle Ralph in the back seat of his repair van.

He resisted, at first. But she was legal, and insistent, and Ralph didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. The affair was short lived—a guilt-ridden Uncle Ralph broke it off after only three trysts. But three was enough. Laneesha, now pregnant, assumed that stand-up Uncle Ralph would do the right thing. She was mature enough to know he wasn’t going to marry her, but expected child support and shared custody.

Instead, her father beat the hell out of Uncle Ralph, ordering him to never see her again, and then insisted she terminate the pregnancy. Laneesha refused, and her father kicked her out. Uncle Ralph also refused to see her again, offering her the money for an abortion and nothing else.

Laneesha had no friends because she’d never bothered to make any. She was forced to live in shelters, and eventually gave birth to her beautiful daughter, Brianna. But welfare checks didn’t stretch very far for a young mother. Without a babysitter she couldn’t get a job, and without a job she couldn’t get a babysitter, so she took to shoplifting to survive.

Chicago had many chain department stores, and Laneesha kept her strategy simple. She’d steal something at one store, then return it at another store for the cash. If they refused to give her cash, as they sometimes did without a receipt, she traded the item for something she needed, or something she could pawn.

It worked for several months. Laneesha began looking for a place of her own, and was planning on getting a job and a nanny once she saved up a thousand dollars. She was only sixty bucks short of her goal when a dumb department store clerk became distracted and left a pair of expensive diamond earrings on the counter unattended. It was only for a few seconds, but Laneesha couldn’t resist the temptation. She grabbed them, shoved them in Brianna’s diaper, and beat a hasty retreat.

But she was caught. Even worse, the store had tapes of her stealing four other items over the course of several months. It had been a trap. They pressed charges for grand theft, social services took Brianna, and Laneesha wound up at the Center.

The Center made her realize two things. First, people her own age weren’t so bad. Meadow, for all his frontin’, was actually a pretty good guy. Not daddy material, but they developed a bond that Laneesha could honestly say was love. Second, Laneesha was more determined than ever to get paroled and get Brianna back. And she was on track to do so. A hearing was coming up, and Sara was going to recommend parole, and once she had a job she was going to begin the steps to reclaim her child. Maybe Meadow would even be in the picture.

But staring at that huge pile of bones after half an hour of listening to Meadow’s tortured screams made Laneesha doubt she’d ever get off the island alive.

Laneesha clung to Sara, digging her carefully manicured nails into the psychologist’s arm, staring at the most horrifying thing she’d ever seen.

“
How…how many you think?” she asked.

“
Thousands,” Sara whispered.

Martin took the light from Sara, moved closer to the pile. “These bones are old. Really old.”

“
Who are they?” Laneesha asked.

Martin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Sara began to back up, pulling Laneesha along with her. “Martin, those… wild people. They must have retied the ribbons. To lead us to this place. They’re probably coming right now.”

Martin went rigid, then whispered. “They’re already here.”

Laneesha felt like she stuck her finger in a socket, electricity jolting through her and causing her to run somewhere, anywhere. She broke away from Sara and dashed into the field of bones.

The were no trees here, and the moon was bright, so Laneesha could move much faster than she had in the woods. Part of her brain registered Sara yelling her name, but Laneesha wasn’t going to stop. Not for Sara. Not for anybody. While Laneesha feared those crazy cannibal people, she had more to think about than just her life. If she died, Brianna would be motherless. Laneesha couldn’t let that happen.

She turned a quick corner around the mound, kicking something that she realized was a skull, switching directions again and seeking out the woods. She could hide in the trees, wait until morning. Then she would find the camp, radio that boat guy, and live to see her daughter again. Hopefully, Sara and Martin and the rest of them would make it too. But a part of Laneesha, a large part, also made her understand that if those cannibals were busy eating the others, they would have full bellies and be less inclined to track her down.

It’s all for Brianna,
she told herself.

But stupid as it was, she couldn’t find the trees. Earlier, she thought she’d be stuck in the woods forever, never seeing the clear sky again. Now all she saw was sky and bones.

They were everywhere, a giant garbage dump of various-sized mounds, some only as high as her hip, others too tall to see over. There was no real path, no real direction, and Laneesha took another turn and found herself standing on top of an unstable pile. She stopped, turned, and her foot got stuck. Lanessha looked down, saw she was caught in some sort of trap.

No, not a trap. A man’s ribcage.

Another spark of panic made her cry out, kicking the foul thing off her foot, pushing onward through the bone field. There was no ground any more, no dirt. She waded, calf-deep, through bones. When she tried to get on top of them, they wouldn’t support her completely. Laneesha had a ridiculous thought about Chuck E Cheese, that children’s pizza slash arcade with the room filled with thousands of plastic balls. It was impossible to stand up in that room, and almost as difficult standing here.

Laneesha attempted to backtrack, feeling bones snap under her weight—
bones, jesus, these were once inside people—
and she tripped, falling face first into the pile.

The pain was sharp and made her draw a breath. She turned onto her side, tried to sit up, her hands fluttering around the knife embedded in her shoulder.

But, of course, it wasn’t a knife at all.

I’ve got someone’s bone sticking in me.

Laneesha felt the blood drain from her head, the whole world start to spin. But she couldn’t pass out, for Brianna’s sake, so she twisted onto all fours and began to crawl, determined to get away, determined to survive.

Then the smell hit her. A musty, rotten stench, moist and cloying. It reminded Laneesha of food gone bad. But this wasn’t food, this was
people
. Human beings. Laneesha shut her eyes and crunched up her face so her lips blocked her nostrils, and moved even faster while she tried not to puke.

The throb in her shoulder stabbed deeper, hurting ten times worse, and Laneesha cried out. She tried to move, but couldn’t.

The bone had caught on something.

Laneesha didn’t want to touch it, and she tried to ease back, but she felt like she’d been staked to the spot. Eyes still closed, she raised a hesitant hand to her shoulder, felt the object she was stuck to.

The bone had caught on something large and bumpy, shaped sort of like a big pretzel.

Someone’s pelvis.

Laneesha pushed, but the pelvis held firm. Then she tried to pull the bone from her shoulder and almost passed out. While the bone was no bigger than hot dog, it was old and brittle. When Laneesha tried to remove it, the bone splintered, digging in like a fishhook barb,

Laneesha had to take a breath, becoming dangerously light-headed, her gorge rising fast. She cradled the pelvis in her hand and tried to lift. It was attached to something. Not having any choice, she looked down.

Legs. Bits of sinew still connected the pelvis to two decimated leg bones.

Laneesha jerked up, and the hip joints pulled free of their sockets with a cracking sound. Then she crawled, one hand pressing the pelvis to her chest, through the bones until she could stand up again.

Only a few yards away, silhouetted by the moonlight, a man rushed at her.

Laneesha got to her feet, stumbling away from the man, ignoring the pain and dashing through two large mounds of bones. The trees had to be close. The bone piles seemed to end just ahead. If she could just make it, just get away long enough to—

She stopped abruptly. The bone field did end, but instead of the forest Laneesha found herself facing a large stone building. It looked like a fortress, two stories high, stretching out a hundred feet in each direction.

Laneesha heard a creaking sound, looked up, saw an arch above her. Hanging on chains was an ancient wooden sign.

Rock Island Prison.

Then something hit her on the head and everything went black.

Cindy felt her heart sink when the screaming stopped. It was awful to hear, the most awful thing she’d ever heard. When it ended she had a very real feeling that Meadow—and it sure sounded like Meadow—was dead.

Still, she and Tyrone headed in the direction the cries had been coming from. Cindy didn’t like Meadow. But if there was a chance to help him, she would take that chance. One thing the Center had taught her was the value of life. Every life.

She held the torch, grateful for both the light and the warmth it emitted. In only her bra, the night air gave her goosebumps. Tyrone walked at her side. He held the gun, now cool enough to touch, in his left hand. His right hand was wrapped in his T-shirt. After fleeing the campsite, she’d insisted on examining his injuries. His left only had a few small blisters. His right looked like raw hamburger.

Still, Tyrone didn’t complain. He marched onward, just as determined to save Meadow as she was.

Neither of them talked about what they’d seen at the camp. But Cindy couldn’t help but think the same thing had happened to Meadow. She shivered. In the past, she’d thought a lot about death, and always expected it would be with a needle in her arm. But death by cannibals? Who could have ever conceived of such a thing?